Tailgate and chain from google images Well I had a problem. It was time to do some upkeep on one of my trailers but Mama said she needed to have a little talk with me.
The punch line was that I kept spending a lot of money on my projects and that I should try to be a little more innovative. I spent some time thinking about that. If I use the scrap pile, $10.00 will cover the trailer and maybe a couple other projects as well. If I run out of welding rods you can add another $5.00.
To get the full use out of this trailer I need to have a tailgate. It actually already had a frame for a tailgate and I had it installed, sort of. I needed a chain like this and I had no intention to go out and buy one after being told to be innovative. I went to the junk pile and found one but no to connecters.
The punch line was that I kept spending a lot of money on my projects and that I should try to be a little more innovative. I spent some time thinking about that. If I use the scrap pile, $10.00 will cover the trailer and maybe a couple other projects as well. If I run out of welding rods you can add another $5.00.
To get the full use out of this trailer I need to have a tailgate. It actually already had a frame for a tailgate and I had it installed, sort of. I needed a chain like this and I had no intention to go out and buy one after being told to be innovative. I went to the junk pile and found one but no to connecters.
This is where some of my day and about $4.80 were spent. It is 3/8” reinforcing bar. You don't normally see it because it's job is to hide inside concrete and make it resistant to torsion. 3/8" is supposed to be small enough to fit through my chain link. There was, however, a quality control problem. Some 3/8” bars are slightly larger than others. Most of these redneck connectors will be used where that makes no difference but today it did. The first question, one supposes, is how does one get from a 24” straight stick to one of these. It's pretty hard stuff to bend.
I once met a lumberjack in a bar by the bus station in Portland, Maine. He impressed me greatly with a simple feat of strength. He asked me for a dime, then with his thumb and forefinger he bent it. I quickly became very polite to him and could have used his strength today. Since I didn’t have him I used these two pipes in the foreground. I think they are half inch pipes but whatever the size, the 3/8” rebar fits snugly inside. One of them was about 48” long and that, my children, makes a good cheater bar. It was formerly used in some sort of lighting project that my students scrapped out.
I measured the first few. Thought 1 1/2” would be a good. By the time I had done 3 or 4 I didn’t need the tape.
When you have it in both pipes just stand on one and lift the longest one you have.
Now I know this thing was a little rusty but it was strong pipe. Might give an idea how resistant to bending a 3/8" steel rod can be. I just lopped this end off with the grinder and started over.
When it gets to this point just cut evenly.
I needed to attach two of these to the gate with chain welded in place. The chain ends on the trailer would get one of these but the ends on the gate would not. I came up with this after starting. I had intended to place one of these links on each end but it won’t get around the rebar on the tailgate. Now the plan is that if the gate needs to come off or be lowered further I will just pull the end on the trailer.
This is how it’s supposed to look. When I figured out that the link wouldn’t fit all the rebar I wound up butchering the chain link on the left side. It works but since it’s ugly I didn’t take a picture. I’m pretty happy with this one.
This is where I left off the first day. By the second day I expected this tailgate to be a serviceable metal workbench that one could weld on. I also needed to make a gate for the back pasture and think this will be useful. You can see the expanded metal I intended to use laying under the tailgate. It was even cheaper. Tomorrow is another day.
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